Higher Performance, Lower Cost for HPC Fabric with Intel® OPA

Higher Performance, Lower Cost for HPC Fabric with Intel® OPA

Higher Performance, Lower Cost for HPC Fabric with Intel® OPA

A fast, scalable fabric is essential to maximize cluster performance, yet traditional InfiniBand* technologies cannot keep pace with growing needs. As a result, organizations are now spending more of their infrastructure budget on fabric elements—money that could potentially be used to scale compute and storage resources.

Intel® Omni-Path Architecture (Intel® OPA), a building block of ...Intel® Scalable System Framework (Intel® SSF), rises to meet this challenge by transforming the performance, scalability, and cost models of HPC fabrics. This end-to-end fabric solution delivers high port bandwidth, while providing low latency that stays low even at extreme scale. Optimized packet protocols, dynamic traffic shaping, and advanced quality of service (QoS) deliver efficient support for diverse traffic types, with high throughput, high packet integrity, and low, deterministic latency for critical MPI messaging.

Reduce Infrastructure RequirementsIntel developed new 48-port switch silicon for Intel OPA, which can reduce fabric costs in a typical fat tree configuration. This new silicon powers a family of 24- and 48-port edge switches and 192- and 768-port director-class switches that can be used to support the full range of HPC requirements. With the Intel OPA 48-port leaf cards, a single 5-hop fabric can support up to 27,648 nodes, which is 2.3 times more than can be supported using current InfiniBand switch designs (an InfiniBand fabric would require 7-hops to go beyond 11,664 nodes).4